The Daughter and I were at the mall not too long ago, getting in one last Daddy-Daughter Date before my official 2007 Christmas Season Mall Embargo begins. I almost always park in a corner of the lot that has us enter the mall through the Men’s Department in Sears; for some reason it is like some sort of parking purgatory that people avoid like the plague, meaning I can almost always get a great spot AND keep my eyes open for clothing sales as I pass through that part of the store. Yes, I know, it clearly does not take too much to thrill me, but middle-aged men are not granted too many pleasures any more and we must take them where we find them.
ANYWAAAAAAAAY…though I had to literally pull my arm out of Charlotte’s clutches to look at a couple of items before she yanked me to the toy store, it came to my attention that argyle sweaters are back in fashion. Several different displays from more than one of the clothing manufacturers that Sears carries featured more than one style of argyle sweater, and then, as we walked through the separate Land’s End section of the store, there was more argyle on display there.
Back in the mid-1980s, when everybody else was wearing sport coats pushed up to the elbows with pastel t-shirts underneath, or space-alien leather jackets with linebacker shoulder pads, I was wearing argyle sweaters and pleated pants (that was my famous “Thin Period”, needless to say, when I could wear pleats without looking like a giant beach ball). It was the tail-end of the preppy look that had been popular the year I graduated from high school, and the popped-collar Izod polo and Sperry Topsiders look that was so cool in 1981 was a bit dog-eared by 1985, but the argyle sweater was holding its own. I used to make a regular habit of visiting the men’s department in the old Marshall Field’s store in downtown Evanston every couple of weeks to buy some clothes, and those visits almost always included argyle sweaters. The alterations lady at the store knew me well and called me her “little professor” because of the bookish look I gave off. Time marched on, naturally, and so before long the argyle sweaters were back to being out-of-style, which was just as well because once I graduated and went back to Maine, I gained back all of the weight I worked so hard to lose, so none of the sweaters fit anyway.
But, since nostalgia trends are usually about whatever was popular 20 years ago, it is just about right on time for them to be back on the shelves, along with some other early-80s fashions. I note that there’s a bit of a craze among the ironic hipster crowd for “Member’s Only” jackets to replace the trucker hats and worn-out t-shirts that were popular a couple of years ago, and shirt-dresses and corduroys are all the rage. Polo shirts never really went out of style as they transformed into the Corporate Casual Uniform for Men in the 1990s, but apparently it’s cool again to pop the collar and wear pastel colors.
I need to do some refreshing in my sweater wardrobe anyway, so you can guess what I’ll be buying. Now, if I could only drop those 60 pounds, it would be like 1984 all over again.
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It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
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